You can help by reporting these Tweets to Twitter. You can also let us know you reported them by also reporting them to our online tool FightAgainstHate.com. We would also very much welcome report of new examples of racism against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, these too can be reported to us viaFightAgainstHate.com.

The Online Hate Prevention Institute notes that Twitter has improved its policies and does now prohibit “Hateful conduct” which should cover the examples below. The Twitter rules now say “You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories.”

Unfortunately the reporting facility itself has not been updated to implement this, so there is no specific way to report hateful conduct from within Twitter. In our instructions below we suggest reporting it as “abusive or harmful” and within that category as “disrespectful or offensive”. This is not ideal, but it is what best fits the reporting system. There is also a separate reporting form for abuse behavior but the closest thing on this form is for “abuse” which Twitter defines on the form very narrowly as being violations of the rule that “Users may not make direct, specific threats of violence against others”. This language is taken from US law and very few examples of abuse would meet the standard of being both direct enough and specific enough.

Recommendation: Twitter should alter its reporting system to match the categories of reports under its current rules.

Until this is done, it is unsurprising that Twitter would have difficulties implementing their rules. There is a disconnect between their technology people and their policy people and that gap needs to close.

Table of contents

Examples of the racism from Twitter

How to report racism to Twitter

How to report Twitter based racism to FightAgainstHate.com

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Examples of the racism from Twitter

Each of the following examples is presented both with text and with an image of the Tweet. You can see live version of the Tweet, then report it if it is still online, by clicking on the image. Further instructions are available at the end of this briefing.

1. “@joneudaimonia @Bernies4_Trump @farwzaz your problem is you believe the made up nonsense. There was no mass murder of Tasmanian Abos Never”

2. “@SamuelRasekh A. The 1st Australians weren’t abos, they were Brits who conquered the abos. Australia as a country didn’t exist before”

3. “Where’s the Govt on this? I cant change the color of my house for ‘heritage’, but Abos can slaughter at will #auspol”

4. “A bloke is driving across outback Australia and runs over a family of Abos eating road kill. He picks them up,… http://fb.me/N8C2c4Wg ” The link goes to a Facebook post which reads: A bloke is driving across outback Australia and runs over a family of Abos eating road kill. He picks them up, digs a hole at the side of the road, and buries them. When he gets to the other side of Australia, he wants to do the white thing, so he reports what he did to the police, who ask him, “Are you sure they were dead?” Bloke: “Oh yeah, some of reckoned they weren’t, but you know what lying bastards they are.”5. “@EDdotSE @intelligent50 @adezero Australia never needed to use guns to defend anything. Your only resource is petrol sniffing abos.”